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AI Humanities
This refers to an elective course at the School of AI. AI Humanities (Book Review) Hello world, it's Siraj and welcome to AI Humanities. I've spent the past few weeks reading ... books that I'd like to share with you. I call it AI Humanities because it relates AI to various aspects of human culture and society. My list is sequential each book will answer questions that come up from the previous book. The average person only reads a few books a year but the average CEO reads four or five books a month; leaders are readers. if someone spends decades accumulating knowledge on a topic, then puts it all into a book and you can read that book in .. or .. days, you can download decades of knowledge instantly. The way I read so many books so fast is that I listened to these books as audiobooks at 3X speed and I scheduled my reading time usually one hour a day. If you don't schedule your reading time, you'll be much more likely to skip it. So let's start with the first, The Master Algorithm. This was a pretty high level overview of the entire field of machine learning aimed at the layman but I wouldn't say this book is meant for someone who's never even heard of machine learning. The first couple chapters are probably accessible to a layman but it's in the later chapters that the author starts detailing various algorithms in a way that presumes at least a little bit of background knowledge. If you want an absolute beginner book to get into machine learning, like a prerequisite to this list, I'd recommend hands on machine learning with scikit-learn and tensorflow. Anyway, what I liked most about this book was the conceptual model that was created of the field. The author categorized different areas of thought in machine learning into their own respective tribes there are the simplest the connectionists the evolutionary's the Bayesian x' and the analyzers each have their own perspective on what the best most generalized smartest algorithm is. He then goes on to actually algorithmically describe back propagation and Genetic Programming master algorithms for each of these tribes which was pretty cool ultimately. He argues that the eventual master algorithm able to learn how to do any task is likely a combination of all of these and we are slowly getting there discovery by discovery I like how he makes connections between these separate methodologies saying that no matter what technique we use all of them are meant to do the same three things: Represent, Evaluate and Optimize. Reading the master algorithm got me thinking more about the future of AI if we did create the master algorithm how would we use it as a species what would the future look like and that led me to the book life . by MIT professor and physicist max tegmark. Tegmark goes on to describe life . as biological evolution life . as cultural evolution in life . Aztec evolution my favorite part of the book was the fictional story of the super intelligent AI called Prometheus and how it was used by a company to basically conquer the world. It was actually plausible. He mentioned it using tools like AWS and gaming the stock market to demonstrate a concrete example of how things could go wrong over all that's what stood out for me from the book how things could go wrong and that question led me to read super intelligence by professor Nick Bostrom. This is the book on AI safety how things could go wrong and how we can possibly stop it. The example that sticks out above all else is his paperclip Maximizer idea that if we tell an AI to make as many paperclip as possible that could potentially go wrong in that the AI would then turn all matter including humans into paperclips in order to complete its objective scary stuff but I do think Boström could have been more specific in his ideas about which algorithms in particular he fears the most and how that could happen in a detailed way. What entity would do this what would be the context things like that in general the fear-mongering around AI is really distracting to what the actual problem is I'm not afraid of super intelligent AI, I'm afraid of humans using AI to exploit other humans technology is like fire, it can be used to either earn us or to give us warmth so above all else apocalyptic AI is actually a problem of human morality. Whoever creates a real AGI will decide how to use it based on their morality and how do we even regulate morality on a global scale. We can't even decide on what good and evil is as a species thinking about morality had Miri read a book from my favorite classical philosopher Nietzsche called Beyond Good and Evil. I remember during my first year at Columbia, we had a list of philosophers that we had to read about from taunt to Plato but none of their philosophies really resonated with me then I read Nietzsche he basically tore down every other philosophers conception of morality his base conviction is that the universe is in a constant state of change so absolutes like good or evil or even God are too rigid in fact they are forms of enslavement in his eyes. In particular, he digs into how the institution of the church has enslaved man and hampered his will to power this drive for freedom and domination over other things he criticizes; how the church has failed to truly represent Jesus, how it demonized is flourishing in life and glorifies living in a pathetic life. Nietzsche is like the angsty teen of philosophers. Now, I myself am not religious but it did get me thinking about how religion does offer order in the midst of the complexity and chaos of our reality by providing a set of rules to abide by and in a world where as Nietzsche would put it god is dead where the scientific rationality that sprung up during the Age of Enlightenment triumphed over sacred revelations we need some sort of set of principles or rulebook to live by. Especially in this information age where there's just so much data that's being thrown at us from every angle so I went ahead and read a book that's currently very popular called 12 Rules for Life by Dr. Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist. The book delves into a set of basic life principles that we can use to become more disciplined, behave better, act with integrity and balance our lives, while enjoying them as much as we can. Each rule is simple like "Aim to do what is meaningful not convenient". He combines ideas from you, Nietzsche, Orwell and Freud to help make suggestions on the basis of psychology. Now, I don't agree with everything he says in the book and I don't endorse any one particular political ideology because education applies to everyone. I like how Peterson illuminates the spectrum in which all opinions and beliefs lie. He acknowledges that the world is not binary -- it has incredible complexity -- there are many layers to society and human nature and he mentions that in this information era we become increasingly polarized in our beliefs. He's right about that society has become very polarized the past few years. My theory being that it's largely due to the rise of social media. To help examine that theory I then read Ten Reasons to Delete Your Social Media by one of my favorite authors Jerome Lanier. I've actually read several of his works before which inspired me to write my own book years ago. Lanier has technical authority. He's one of the founders of the internet who evangelized the power of technology early on but is now one of the most critical figures when it comes to it. Look, I use social media and without it I wouldn't be able to give you this message so there is a benefit to it but the larger idea that he argues is that social media has allowed for industrial scale manipulation and behavioral modification in a way that's never before been possible and AI algorithms both in a direct and indirect way are polarizing society the best AI engineers in the world are working on ads figuring out how to maximize your attention AI is of course also being used to benefit humanity in a lot of ways but this book in particular made me want to really narrow my focus on what exactly I personally found to be the most exciting part about AI deepmind's alpha fold victory applying AI to biology was definitely a promising direction biology in general is something I felt like I needed to refresh my knowledge on so I read the gene an intimate history by Dr. Mookerjee, an oncologist. The book takes the reader through the history of the gene and genetic research all the way from Aristotle to Crick and scribes, the decades of progress in this area like a riveting adventure. It was like an action movie; an insight from one scientist on evolution fed into other insights from other scientists on how genes could work together. I learned that a lot of things that I was so excited about regarding the possibility of human enhancement. Using genetic technology had already been talked about and debated for decades. The atom, the gene and the bite, he argued are the three fundamental building blocks of science and technology and the intersection of each would define progress in the 21st century like Alpha Fold recently did. One area of the book that I found particularly interesting was that there's still so much about genetics that we don't understand the gene actually doesn't give us the whole story behind our actions and our traits. Infact, an entire field called epigenetics, which literally means "on top of genetics", refers to the information layered on top of the sequence of letters in DNA. It describes inheritance by mechanisms other than through the DNA sequence of genes and that field is still evolving. So, I started looking of books on epigenetics and I came upon a book called the physics of God again. I don't ascribe to any one religion an agnostic but this book was definitely eye-opening it aims to unify quantum mechanics, consciousness, neuroscience and genetics into one cohesive theory. The author argues that scientific materialism has only been able to explain so much and that there exists a holographic energy body that governs the billions of coordinated biochemical events happening at the genetic level at every second via quantum entanglement the author point to various Eastern mystical concepts about the soul from various religions as alluding to this idea in a primitive way the very notion of a holographic energy body is non material it would live on a different plane and couldn't be empirically tested but it would help fill the gaps that genetics and epigenetics have yet to explain the idea that all living things are connected to each other that we are more than the material machinery of our bodies. It's a comforting idea for sure. I'm not sure if it's true or not but it did get me to question the nature of reality more fundamentally. Eastern and western philosophy have been separated by physical distance for hundreds of years but with the internet and better mediums of communication we can bring the best ideas from these disciplines together to help solve the mysteries of the universe and in thinking about the potential for Eastern philosophy, I picked up a copy of a Thai superpowers by Dr. Kai Fuli, former head of Google China, I really like this book and use a lot of the insights from it to make my video on AI in China it opened my eyes to how China is shaping AI and how the future might not necessarily look Western but instead be shaped by China. The amount of AI innovation happening there is incredible and his description of how different the market is in China was fascinating. I really liked how he avoided vague AI apocalyptic predictions and instead focused on mass scale unemployment due to AI as the real problem that could occur. Kai-fu believes that not all human capabilities can be replicated with AI, that we still have something about us that's not purely mechanical and his narrative becomes pretty emotional in some parts as he describes how he survived cancer which made him appreciate his humanity that much more this book got me pretty hype about how much China is embracing AI technology and I've never even been to China yet. So, to learn more about Chinese culture I read the last book on my list The Three-Body Problem. This is a wildly popular Chinese sci-fi novel that was a few years ago transcribed to English for the first time and I absolutely love this book it got pretty technical in some parts XI chains explanations of physics and computing or on point and I especially liked how he brought characters like von Neumann and Einstein and Aristotle back to life in the simulated game environment to help explain different concepts. This book was full of big, grand ideas and it allowed me to peek into Chinese culture in that there were a lot of colloquial references to food and tradition. Overall, it helped me appreciate humanity's progress in science much more. So, that's it for my list. I hope you found it useful join the #school-of-AI-book-club channel in our slack group to discuss your ongoing thoughts with peers I'll give a Twitter shout out to the first wizard that finishes my list. Let me know when you do. What's your favorite book? Let me know in the comments section and please subscribe for more technology videos. For now, I'm gonna read Osho's works. So, thanks for watching!